’Hey, what’s this weird banner doing here?’ You might think. ‘Haven’t I seen it before?’ Yes, you have, me and Maikel wrote the previous interview with the Ankama studios developers and we’re the ones doing it this time around as well.

We once more set off on Maikel’s motor bike leaving the office of NiSuTe Europe in Tilburg, crossing the Belgium border on our way to the next. And yet again, we lost our way in Belgium -why can’t they put the signs at the right place- so after a small detour we arrived at the French border. Our travel from there on was without any problems and we finally arrived at Ankama Studios.

This time the interview was mainly hosted by 3 of Ankama’s Employees: Thomas Bahon, Cédric Gerard and Michael Thant. After a quick tour through their new office we all settled down to do what we came for, interviewing. Every now and then during the interview more employees of Ankama would join us to answer our department specific questions. The questioned departments were: Development, Artist/Animation and Music. The full interview took us 6 hours so get ready, this is going to be a long read.

Well Ankama has moved. Previously they were cramped up in 4 tiny offices trying to do their work in a building they had to share with some other small companies. Nowadays they have a nice new location totally for themselves. This location is situated in an old textile factory. The offices are located at the first half of the 1st floor and the employees are already working there in full glory at their new location. Even some desk decoration is popping up here and there. The rest of the old factory is still being renovated. But if Ankama keeps growing at the pace they currently are, that space will soon be needed for expansion. Currently, Ankama has 80 employees working for them and if everything goes as it should, they will reach 90 by the end of this month. And to give you a small idea of how fast they’re actually growing, when we did the last interview, their employee total was 40.

Between this interview and the previous one, a lot has changed for Ankama; as told in our previous article they’re still working on projects for other companies and the demand is rising steadily. Unfortunately Ankama is not allowed to tell us for who they are working. Next to all this, they also started housing an animation section. This animation section is working for their current new project: Wakfu. But they are also trying to create a TV animation series about the Dofus/Wakfu Universe.

Ever since Ankama started creating games they were passionate about gaming and that might be why the games at Ankama have this special feeling about them. “We’re talking about the special feeling gamers get with both gaming classics and innovative new games.” At Ankama they believe that the selection and hiring of passionate new personel for their games contributes to this development – and so do we. We hope that Ankama won’t do what we have seen happen in so many other development teams and lose their passion to satisfy the majority of the players – but from the looks of it, they couldn’t be further away from that possible future.

Ankama is also working to increase it’s relations with other countries. They admit their current advertising was directed almost exclusively at France. This is about to change. In a short period of time big advertising projects will start in the UK, under the supervision of Michel. If those are a success they are planning to advertise in Germany, Spain, Netherlands and maybe even the US. They aren’t planning to do all of these advertising campaigns at the same time, allowing their servers to keep up with the growth of the user base. And if the advertising is successful enough, every country that had advertising will get its own separate server. Specific servers will be progressively put in place for the various countries, regardless of any advertising campaign.

Anyway this was the information about Ankama studios’ current status and their near future; now it’s time to reveal to you some stuff about their games.

Let’s start with Dofus… Ah bummer, I reached my word limit for today’s article… Maybe I will write about that information next time. *evil smirk*

Back to Ankama part 2

Ok, ok, OK! I will, I will! It seems that a lot of you Ankama (read Dofus) fans actually hoped my previous article would reveal some inside info about Ankama’s games. Well, you’re finally getting what you’re waiting for – the “good” stuff. (As if my previous article wasn’t good enough, so ungrateful….)

Let’s start with Dofus.

For our readers that don’t know the game let me give you a short introduction to Dofus.

In short, Dofus is a Flash-based, tactical MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) which has its unique artwork and humor, giving the game its own special feeling to play. You start with one of the 12 classes and explore its colorful world. In this world you can gain levels by killing monsters or doing quests. When you have gained certain levels you learn new spells/powers so you can fight bigger and stronger monsters. You can also learn jobs to gather resources and/or process resources into helpful items like gear, potions and the like.

Dofus keeps expanding still. Totally new updates pop up, giving access to new areas, dungeons or monsters. One of those future updates is the new Low Level Mountain. This Mountain will be the new spawning area for newly created characters of pay to play accounts (free to play accounts are restricted to Astrub still, thus will spawn at their class statue there). On this mountain the freshly born characters can go through various quests and dungeons to learn the basics of this game, making it a lot easier for totally new players to understand how this game works. This Mountain will also be the first area with level restrictions. No one above level 20 will be able to access it so the “newborns” can first build up their strength before they’re left alone in the vicious game world. The new area has, like the many “new” areas, an upgrade in its looks. And for the first time they are using real backgrounds. If you take a good look at our pictures you can actually see Astrub as if you’re looking at it from a real mountain. This new area is perfectly timed with Ankama’s current Advertising plans so the new wave of foreign players can start this game without being scared away by the complexity the game used to have for beginning players.

There is also another new island on the drawing board. This island alone will contain at least 10 new dungeons divided over 3 layers (underground, ground level and treetop/sky level). Ankama also revealed a secret new ability that most likely will available on this island. The new ability is still in development so we can’t tell you more about it.

From various forums we gathered player-made questions about Ankama. We took the opportunity during the visit to ask as many as we could.

Dofus Q&A

Question: Will other classes get their unique spell (class special spell) like the Iop and Ecaflip have?

Answer Bill: Yes, they will. At the moment we’re still thinking of what abilities those other classes will gain. We want them to be truly unique and one of their kind. So they will enhance battle tactics and not just make the class more powerful. But eventually they will come – it’s just a matter of time.

Question: Will there be more international servers?

Answer Bill: Maybe. But to start a new server Ankama has to be 100% sure the new server will have a big enough player base to start with. Dofus economy cannot work on a few accounts alone it needs a decent player base to start working.

Question: Will Dofus get better music?

Answer Guillaume: For the time being no. Flash has almost no music support forcing us to add music in the game as mp3 files. For example, if the game would have better music you need file sizes of at least 1,5MB per music file. Currently there is only 5 MB available for the entire music package. Thus at the moment the Music artist compressed all his Dofus artistic composition into a package of 5MB. And trust me I don’t like it one bit to hear my artistic compositions being compressed to the tunes they are right now. But improvement is on its way for the other games Ankama is working on.

Question: When will this endless class nerfing end?

Answer Bill: There are still discussions going on about abilities that are too powerful and abilities that need some boosts. The main intention we have is this: the higher your level is, the more tactics, by usage of spells, you’ll need. Currently though the character with the biggest sword wins. So be prepared to see an upcoming nerf of all melee weapons as well.

Question: Will there be more events in Dofus run by a game master?

Answer Michael: We are working on it. Every server will get its personal community manager that will be in charge of those events.

Question: Will Dofus vanish when Wakfu is released?

Answer Bill: That’s fully up to you. As long as Dofus has a large enough player base, the game will continue to exist and will receive regular updates which will add new material to play with.

Question: What will be the bonus of getting a character up to level 200?

Answer Bill: It’s currently unknown/undecided but it’s worked on with great haste. That’s because on Rushu there is almost a character that has reached that point. One thing we are sure about is that it will be a new move that will enhance tactics and not just make the character more powerful than he already is.

HMMMMMz word count is nearing 900 while I’m only allowed to make articles of about 600 words. (This is done so it’s kept easy to read for everyone). Oh well, this time it isn’t my fault you won’t be getting more information for the time being. You guys just asked too many questions about Dofus alone. I guess I have to tell you about Dofus Arena and Wakfu in our next article about the interview.

Back to Ankama part 3

Well let me first apologize to all the fans out there waiting anxiously for our 3rd and last article. Life caught up with me and I had some unexpected obligations that kept me from finishing this article. Again, my apologies, I’m only Osamodan, so unless it’s summoning I can’t do magic.

Anyway, let’s not waste to many words on my apologies, because I will end up needing a 4th. I might be cruel sometimes but I’m not THAT cruel. Tempting? Yes, but it also means making yet another article in my current situation so I’d rather not.

As many of you know, Ankama has another game running: Dofus Arena. This battle mainly uses the battle concept of Dofus and but developed into an entirely revamped game. Ankama did and is still doing a lot of work on that game. In a near future it will get a major update. The battle system is revised, how exactly is still under debate so we can’t tell you about it, yet. The engine in use is upgraded. Up until now Dofus Arena only used Flash to run the game. Now Ankama Studios is working on a new engine that is still based on Flash, But has Java rendered animations. Allowing the game to have a background animation like running waterfalls. And of course these new animations are used for the spells too, so your eyes will be treated with nice works of art whenever you cast a spell. (Sorry fans there are no devices yet which can playback seen memories, if so I would have gladly shown you what we saw) Anyway from what we saw this game has gained major improvements and this game will also be a test for the new engine because Wakfu will be using a similar engine.

‘Finally’, you might think. Think again, I am their sorry to tell you but we didn’t get to see a lot of their new project Wakfu. Of course we asked them some player questions about it, but they didn’t reveal very much. Do understand that this game is far from finished and a lot of concepts are still in discussion. Even if Ankama showed us what they had, chances would have been that they would be changed/removed from the game before I even managed to write this article. Of course I can tell you the already known facts like moving maps, etc. But I think most of this article’s readers already did. What we can tell you are a few answers which we and some players asked about concerning the game. I hope those will please you enough for this long awaited article *hides in shame*.

Question: Is there a beta of this game? If so when? and will it be French only?
Answer: Yes there will be a closed beta expected in July. Everyone can try to sign up for the newsletter. As soon as it’s announced, from the signed up players a few fortunate will be chosen to play the beta. This beta will mainly test the current battle system of this game. There will be no difference in language spoken meaning English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, etc etc can participate in this beta. Do understand that being able to speak more then one language will make it easier for Ankama to understand you and your findings of the test.

Question: When you are subscribed to Dofus will you have a subscription to Wakfu as well?
Answer: We really don’t know. It has been proposed once in a brainstorm session, but we start to think about it when the game is finished.

Question: Will we see some returning nostalgic Dofus monsters?
Answer: Well you will see the Tofu back of course. It became one of our icons so we can’t leave our most popular monster out of Wakfu. But we don’t know yet about other monsters.

Question: Will you have like Dofus more then one character slots?
Answer: Yes but like Dofus you can’t have more then one of those characters in the game at once.

Question: And multiclienting?
Answer: Ankama studios never liked multiclienting, but we can’t ban it because its fully legal. Although for Wakfu it will be a lot harder to multiclient because some events happen differently then they did in Dofus.

Question: Will Wakfu have better music?
Answer: Yes, because Dofus only uses flash as engine its close to impossible to make ingame translated music files. Which are needed for compressed music files without losing quality. Like we told you in the article about Dofus, music only gets about 5 MB of space to fit their music in. Wakfu will partly/fully use Java as an engine which allows music encryption having it easier to use improved music quality without needing more memory space.

Question: Dofus has a lot of hidden humor (Astrub pub candles, wabbit island statues) will Wakfu have them as well?
Answer: Yes, but we have to be more cautious. We want to have a bigger public for Wakfu and the larger the public, the larger the parent complaints get.

I can finally say I’m done. I hope you all had fun reading my articles. Also let me use this last opportunity to apologize again for the lateness of this article, maybe I should stop subscribing to the MMORPG called real life *wink*

After a swift change from motor-gear into decent clothing we entered the building their office is in. At their office we had a little chat with Thomas Bahon (Director of Products).
The chat was about the history of Ankama and what they do.

Ankama studios was founded by 3 developers: Anthony Roux, Emmanuel Darras and Camille Chafer. They wanted to start a game design studio and founded Ankama studios.
Due to lack of experience they started as a website building company. They had lots of projects and started to make small Flash application sites. By adding more and more flash applications to the sites they made, they gained more and more programming skills. After gathering enough experience, they took the risk to start a MMORPG, Dofus. Many companies laughed about this ambitious project because it was made in Flash. But they didn’t lose confidence and were destined to prove their critics wrong. And they succeeded. The game started very small but got expanded bit by bit to the big success that it is today. The Beta test lasted for one year adding more options every day. For example in the 1st version you weren’t able to see other players on the maps, you could see them only when they joined a battle. The game didn’t and still doesn’t have a lot of music. The reason for this is that it’s difficult to add music to Flash. Because of those difficulties the music currently used in the game can eat up half of the CPU speed. Even so, in these days, Dofus grew to a big MMORPG with a large fan base.

Ankama does a lot more than just working on Dofus.
• They are creating a card game
• They are making art books
• They write mangas
• They build websites
• And they are currently working together with another team to create another website game. (Ankama isn’t allowed to give any details yet)

Their survival in the big game market is due to the level of variety in their projects.

Following the little story with Thomas we had a little tour in their blue office. At first we saw their storage room. It was packed with boxes full of Dofus mangas, Dofus Art Books and Mutafukaz mangas. Next, we were shown the room with website builders. Not much to say about it honestly, just a lot of people sitting behind their PC building websites. The next room was similar to the previous one. Only in this one they had the helpdesk and subscription management. Next was the artists’ room. This room was full of toys and mangas; even a TV-set with a hooked up GameCube and a couch.

When we arrived they immediately stopped doing what they were doing at that moment (playing the game Ribbit King on their GameCube) and acted as if they were working (I sure want their job…) – but you never heard that from us. In one corner was also a music artist listening to his headphones and pushing some keys here and there on his synthesizer which was hooked up to his PC. Last but certainly not least we came to the room where they were working on Dofus. In that room I was introduced to the person who was in charge of the changes to Dofus. Here I got the opportunity to ask the following 2 questions.

Question: Will there be more monster specific areas where there are higher percentages of a certain monster to spawn in a mob?

Answer: Yes there will be more such areas. We had lot of positive responses about the existing ones.

Question: Can the redo button of jobs be changed to a redo and combine button, so there is less movement with the mouse needed, in order to prevent fatigue or even wrist injuries?

Answer: We are working on an improved job system. But keep in mind when you use an automized system you will get less job experience points than when you use a manual one.

After those questions I got him going and he started to show us some nice things that will be coming up in Dofus. Here is a list of what they have shown us:

• The new area for the rideable creatures will be located between the Evil Forest and Sidimote Moor (currently brown on world map and inaccessible). The entrance will be at Cania Plains just a little above Sidimote Moor. At first only the Dragoturkey is rideable. But later on they plan to create about 70 different rideable creatures. When riding the creature you still can use emotes. Some of them will even be done by the creature itself. For example in /sit the creature will then spread his legs and make a sitting position. We also have seen the creature do /oups. Allot more of these emotes will come. As already announced you can buy areas were you can shelter your rideable creatures. But some of these shelters raise its stats, or let you have the creatures mate to make new ones.

• When this new area is opened, a new group of enemies will be revealed. One of them is a new Gobball. This Gobball can enter a frenzy state where he changes colour into the colours of the Jamaican flag. It will have loads of MP and AP when in that state. This new Gobball species has its own equipment set which looks like a 70s set with Jamaican colours and a piece sign amulet.

• New dungeons will be added very soon. One of those dungeons will be a Crackler dungeon.

• They are also working on a dungeon concept where you have to puzzle yourself trough the battle. The enemies you are fighting will be in inaccessible areas and will use switching spells, making strategy key to this dungeon.

• The maximum level is level 200 (Yes we have seen it and yes they admitted that it’s the current max character level)

• Various new Dofus eggs will be added to the game. Some will be confirmed as “fake” Dofus. They can be equipped as a Dofus, but they are not part of the 6 Dofus you have to find in the story. For example the Cawwot Dofus is a Dofus created by the Wabbits. It wasn’t a Dofus that came from the Dragon’s Belly. He told us as well that one of the current available Dofus is also a fake but he didn’t tell us which. Along the new ones several new fakes will be introduced as well.

• A new race will be added like the Wabbits. The Koalas.

• New smaller areas will be added to the game with higher appearance chances for various creatures. Like piglets.

• They are also working on a concept where you can enter a vortex in a map, teleporting you to another part of the same map.

• New pets are coming. These new pets will mainly be there just for the looks. They are easier than the average pet to keep happy, but they give little to none stats. They are just for those who want a pet yet cannot take proper care of the existing ones.

• Ankama is thinking of putting a real prison in the Dofus game where Game Masters can imprison people for a while if they behaved badly or in similar cases.

After our little tour in their studio it was time to end our little visit. But before we left we got some little goodies which will be prizes in a contest for our NiSuTe guild members coming soon. The given goodies were: an art book with 2 custom-made drawings specially made for NiSuTe by the artists, 2 full series of the Dofus Manga, 2 plain Art Books and a Press Set.

After all that, we departed and headed back to the Netherlands (through the almost impossible-to-navigate-through Belgium…). And our memorable adventure thus came to its end.

Here are some more bonus images as a parting gift:

And that’s all folks. Remember, you read it first at NiSuTe.com!